I am Barley’s youngest child, but I’m not sure I could tell you his favorite color, song, or what he’d order at a restaurant anymore. You see, we were separated when I was 12, and haven’t spent a lot of time together since. In middle school, Barley would drop by my Aunt and Uncles’ to visit sometimes, unannounced. In high school, I’d visit him sometimes, unannounced. Visits dwindled from sometimes to a day during my college breaks, and then, as a career girl in the Big Apple over the past three years, I was lucky if I got out of work with enough time to bring him a birthday cake. (Communicating by postcard doesn’t make plans any easier.)

Now that I’m a full-time graduate student studying Clinical Nutrition, I plan to strengthen a bond that I know we share–better-for-you baking–in an effort to strengthen the one that makes us father and daughter. We’ll use the oven in my grandmother’s house, where Barley lives, as often as I can travel there.